Dr. Stockmann reaches for Morten, who, thinking his father will chastise him, starts to run. Dr. Stockmann catches him and grips him by the arm.
MORTEN: Let me go! Let me . . . !
DR. STOCKMANN: Morten . . . Morten . . .
MORTEN, crying in his father’s arms: They called you traitor, an enemy . . . He sobs.
DR. STOCKMANN: Sssh. That’s all. Wash your face.
Mrs. Stockmann takes Morten. Dr. Stockmann stands erect, faces Aslaksen and Hovstad.
DR. STOCKMANN: Good day, gentlemen.
HOVSTAD: Let us know what you decide and we’ll—
DR. STOCKMANN: I’ve decided. I am an enemy of the people.
MRS. STOCKMANN: Tom, what are you . . . ?
DR. STOCKMANN: To such people, who teach their own children to think with their fists—to them I’m an enemy! And my boy . . . my boys . . . my family . . . I think you can count us all enemies.
ASLAKSEN: Doctor, you could have everything you want!
DR. STOCKMANN: Except the truth. I could have everything but that—that the water is poisoned!
HOVSTAD: But you’ll be in charge.
DR. STOCKMANN: But the children are poisoned, the people are poisoned! If the only way I can be a friend of the people is to take charge of that corruption, then I am an enemy! The water is poisoned, poisoned, poisoned! That’s the beginning of it and that’s the end of it! Now get out of here!
HOVSTAD: You know where you’re going to end?
DR. STOCKMANN: I said get out of here! He grabs Aslaksen’s umbrella out of his hand.
MRS. STOCKMANN: What are you doing?
Aslaksen and Hovstad back toward the door as Dr. Stockmann starts to swing.
ASLAKSEN: You’re a fanatic, you’re out of your mind!
MRS. STOCKMANN, grabbing Dr. Stockmann to take the umbrella: What are you doing?
DR. STOCKMANN: They want me to buy the paper, the public, the pollution of the springs, buy the whole pollution of this town! They’ll make a hero out of me for that! Furiously, to Aslaksen and Hovstad: But I’m not a hero, I’m the enemy—and now you’re first going to find out what kind of enemy I am! I will sharpen my pen like a dagger—you, all you friends of the people, are going to bleed before I’m done! Go, tell them to sign the petitions! Warn them not to call me when they’re sick! Beat up my children! And never let her—he points to Petra—in the school again or she’ll destroy the immaculate purity of the vacuum there! See to all the barricades—the truth is coming! Ring the bells, sound the alarm! The truth, the truth is out, and soon it will be prowling like a lion in the streets!
HOVSTAD: Doctor, you’re out of your mind.
He and Aslaksen turn to go. They are in the doorway.
EJLIF, rushing at them: Don’t you say that to him!
DR. STOCKMANN, as Mrs. Stockmann cries out, rushes them with the umbrella: Out of here!
They rush out. Dr. Stockmann throws the umbrella after them, then slams the door. Silence. He has his back pressed against the door, facing his family.
DR. STOCKMANN: I’ve had all the ambassadors of hell today, but there’ll be no more. Now, now listen, Catherine! Children, listen. Now we’re besieged. They’ll call for blood now, they’ll whip the people like oxen— A rock comes through a remaining pane. The boys start for the window. Stay away from there!
MRS. STOCKMANN: The Captain knows where we can get a ship.
DR. STOCKMANN: No ships.
PETRA: We’re staying?
MRS. STOCKMANN: But they can’t go back to school! I won’t let them out of the house!
DR. STOCKMANN: We’re staying.
PETRA: Good!
DR. STOCKMANN: We must be careful now. We must live through this. Boys, no more school. I’m going to teach you, and Petra will. Do you know any kids, street louts, hookey-players—
EJLIF: Oh, sure, we—
DR. STOCKMANN: We’ll want about twelve of them to start. But I want them good and ignorant, absolutely uncivilized. Can we use your house, Captain?
HORSTER: Sure, I’m never there.
DR. STOCKMANN: Fine. We’ll begin, Petra, and we’ll turn out not taxpayers and newspaper subscribers, but free and independent people, hungry for the truth. Oh, I forgot! Petra, run to Grandpa and tell him—tell him as follows: No!
MRS. STOCKMANN, puzzled: What do you mean?
DR. STOCKMANN, going over to Mrs. Stockmann: It means, my dear, that we are all alone. And there’ll be a long night before it’s day—
A rock comes through a paneless window. Horster goes to the window. A crowd is heard approaching.
HORSTER: Half the town is out!
MRS. STOCKMANN: What’s going to happen? Tom! What’s going to happen?
DR. STOCKMANN, holding his hands up to quiet her, and with a trembling mixture of trepidation and courageous insistence: I don’t know. But remember now, everybody. You are fighting for the truth, and that’s why you’re alone. And that makes you strong. We’re the strongest people in the world . . .
The crowd is heard angrily calling outside. Another rock comes through a window.
DR. STOCKMANN: . . . and the strong must learn to be lonely!
The crowd noise gets louder. He walks upstage toward the windows as a wind rises and the curtains start to billow out toward him.
THE CURTAIN FALLS.
THE CRUCIBLE
A PLAY IN FOUR ACTS
1953
Characters
REVEREND PARRIS
BETTY PARRIS
TITUBA
ABIGAIL WILLIAMS
SUSANNA WALCOTT
MRS. ANN PUTNAM
THOMAS PUTNAM
MERCY LEWIS
MARY WARREN
JOHN PROCTOR
REBECCA NURSE
GILES COREY
REVEREND JOHN HALE
ELIZABETH PROCTOR
FRANCIS NURSE
EZEKIEL CHEEVER
MARSHAL HERRICK
JUDGE HATHORNE
DEPUTY GOVERNOR DANFORTH
SARAH GOOD
HOPKINS
A NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL ACCURACY OF THIS PLAY
This play is not history in the sense in which the word is used by the academic historian. Dramatic purposes have sometimes required many characters to be fused into one; the number of girls involved in the “crying-out” has been reduced; Abigail’s age has been raised; while there were several judges of almost equal authority, I have symbolized them all in Hathorne and Danforth. However, I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history. The fate of each character is exactly that of his historical model, and there is no one in the drama who did not play a similar—and in some cases exactly the same—role in history.
As for the characters of the persons, little is known about most of them excepting what may be surmised from a few letters, the trial record, certain broadsides written at the time, and references to their conduct in sources of varying reliability. They may therefore be taken as creations of my own, drawn to the best of my ability in conformity with their known behavior, except as indicated in the commentary I have written for this text.
ACT ONE
(AN OVERTURE)
A small upper bedroom in the home of Reverend Samuel Parris, Salem, Massachusetts, in the spring of the year 1692.
There is a narrow window at the left. Through its leaded panes the morning sunlight streams. A candle still burns near the bed, which is at the right. A chest, a chair, and a small table are the other furnishings. At the back a door opens on the landing of the stairway to the ground floor. The room gives off an air of clean spareness. The roof rafters are exposed, and the wood colors are raw and unmellowed.
As the curtain rises, Reverend Parris is di
scovered kneeling beside the bed, evidently in prayer. His daughter, Betty Parris, aged ten, is lying on the bed, inert.
At the time of these events Parris was in his middle forties. In history he cut a villainous path, and there is very little good to be said for him. He believed he was being persecuted wherever he went, despite his best efforts to win people and God to his side. In meeting, he felt insulted if someone rose to shut the door without first asking his permission. He was a widower with no interest in children, or talent with them. He regarded them as young adults, and until this strange crisis he, like the rest of Salem, never conceived that the children were anything but thankful for being permitted to walk straight, eyes slightly lowered, arms at the sides, and mouths shut until bidden to speak.
His house stood in the “town”—but we today would hardly call it a village. The meeting house was nearby, and from this point outward—toward the bay or inland—there were a few small-windowed, dark houses snuggling against the raw Massachusetts winter. Salem had been established hardly forty years before. To the European world the whole province was a barbaric frontier inhabited by a sect of fanatics who, nevertheless, were shipping out products of slowly increasing quantity and value.
No one can really know what their lives were like. They had no novelists—and would not have permitted anyone to read a novel if one were handy. Their creed forbade anything resembling a theater or “vain enjoyment.” They did not celebrate Christmas, and a holiday from work meant only that they must concentrate even more upon prayer.
Which is not to say that nothing broke into this strict and somber way of life. When a new farmhouse was built, friends assembled to “raise the roof,” and there would be special foods cooked and probably some potent cider passed around. There was a good supply of ne’er-do-wells in Salem, who dallied at the shovelboard in Bridget Bishop’s tavern. Probably more than the creed, hard work kept the morals of the place from spoiling, for the people were forced to fight the land like heroes for every grain of corn, and no man had very much time for fooling around.
That there were some jokers, however, is indicated by the practice of appointing a two-man patrol whose duty was to “walk forth in the time of God’s worship to take notice of such as either lye about the meeting house, without attending to the word and ordinances, or that lye at home or in the fields without giving good account thereof, and to take the names of such persons, and to present them to the magistrates, whereby they may be accordingly proceeded against.” This predilection for minding other people’s business was time-honored among the people of Salem, and it undoubtedly created many of the suspicions which were to feed the coming madness. It was also, in my opinion, one of the things that a John Proctor would rebel against, for the time of the armed camp had almost passed, and since the country was reasonably—although not wholly—safe, the old disciplines were beginning to rankle. But, as in all such matters, the issue was not clear-cut, for danger was still a possibility, and in unity still lay the best promise of safety.
The edge of the wilderness was close by. The American continent stretched endlessly west, and it was full of mystery for them. It stood, dark and threatening, over their shoulders night and day, for out of it Indian tribes marauded from time to time, and Reverend Parris had parishioners who had lost relatives to these heathen.
The parochial snobbery of these people was partly responsible for their failure to convert the Indians. Probably they also preferred to take land from heathens rather than from fellow Christians. At any rate, very few Indians were converted, and the Salem folk believed that the virgin forest was the Devil’s last preserve, his home base and the citadel of his final stand. To the best of their knowledge the American forest was the last place on earth that was not paying homage to God.
For these reasons, among others, they carried about an air of innate resistance, even of persecution. Their fathers had, of course, been persecuted in England. So now they and their church found it necessary to deny any other sect its freedom, lest their New Jerusalem be defiled and corrupted by wrong ways and deceitful ideas.
They believed, in short, that they held in their steady hands the candle that would light the world. We have inherited this belief, and it has helped and hurt us. It helped them with the discipline it gave them. They were a dedicated folk, by and large, and they had to be to survive the life they had chosen or been born into in this country.
The proof of their belief’s value to them may be taken from the opposite character of the first Jamestown settlement, farther south, in Virginia. The Englishmen who landed there were motivated mainly by a hunt for profit. They had thought to pick off the wealth of the new country and then return rich to England. They were a band of individualists, and a much more ingratiating group than the Massachusetts men. But Virginia destroyed them. Massachusetts tried to kill off the Puritans, but they combined; they set up a communal society which, in the beginning, was little more than an armed camp with an autocratic and very devoted leadership. It was, however, an autocracy by consent, for they were united from top to bottom by a commonly held ideology whose perpetuation was the reason and justification for all their sufferings. So their self-denial, their purposefulness, their suspicion of all vain pursuits, their hard-handed justice were altogether perfect instruments for the conquest of this space so antagonistic to man.
But the people of Salem in 1692 were not quite the dedicated folk that arrived on the Mayflower. A vast differentiation had taken place, and in their own time a revolution had unseated the royal government and substituted a junta which was at this moment in power. The times, to their eyes, must have been out of joint, and to the common folk must have seemed as insoluble and complicated as do ours today. It is not hard to see how easily many could have been led to believe that the time of confusion had been brought upon them by deep and darkling forces. No hint of such speculation appears on the court record, but social disorder in any age breeds such mystical suspicions, and when, as in Salem, wonders are brought forth from below the social surface, it is too much to expect people to hold back very long from laying on the victims with all the force of their frustrations.
The Salem tragedy, which is about to begin in these pages, developed from a paradox. It is a paradox in whose grip we still live, and there is no prospect yet that we will discover its resolution. Simply, it was this: for good purposes, even high purposes, the people of Salem developed a theocracy, a combine of state and religious power whose function was to keep the community together, and to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to destruction by material or ideological enemies. It was forged for a necessary purpose and accomplished that purpose. But all organization is and must be grounded on the idea of exclusion and prohibition, just as two objects cannot occupy the same space. Evidently the time came in New England when the repressions of order were heavier than seemed warranted by the dangers against which the order was organized. The witch-hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom.
When one rises above the individual villainy displayed, one can only pity them all, just as we shall be pitied someday. It is still impossible for man to organize his social life without repressions, and the balance has yet to be struck between order and freedom.
The witch-hunt was not, however, a mere repression. It was also, and as importantly, a long overdue opportunity for everyone so inclined to express publicly his guilt and sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims. It suddenly became possible—and patriotic and holy—for a man to say that Martha Corey had come into his bedroom at night, and that, while his wife was sleeping at his side, Martha laid herself down on his chest and “nearly suffocated him.” Of course it was her spirit only, but his satisfaction at confessing himself was no lighter than if it had been Martha herself. One could not ordinarily speak such things in public.
Long-held hatreds of neighbo
rs could now be openly expressed, and vengeance taken, despite the Bible’s charitable injunctions. Land-lust, which had been expressed by constant bickering over boundaries and deeds, could now be elevated to the arena of morality; one could cry witch against one’s neighbor and feel perfectly justified in the bargain. Old scores could be settled on a plane of heavenly combat between Lucifer and the Lord; suspicions and the envy of the miserable toward the happy could and did burst out in the general revenge.
Reverend Parris is praying now, and, though we cannot hear his words, a sense of his confusion hangs about him. He mumbles, then seems about to weep; then he weeps, then prays again; but his daughter does not stir on the bed.
The door opens, and his Negro slave enters. Tituba is in her forties. Parris brought her with him from Barbados, where he spent some years as a merchant before entering the ministry. She enters as one does who can no longer bear to be barred from the sight of her beloved, but she is also very frightened because her slave sense has warned her that, as always, trouble in this house eventually lands on her back.
TITUBA, already taking a step backward: My Betty be hearty soon?
PARRIS: Out of here!
TITUBA, backing to the door: My Betty not goin’ die . . .
PARRIS, scrambling to his feet in a fury: Out of my sight! She is gone. Out of my— He is overcome with sobs. He clamps his teeth against them and closes the door and leans against it, exhausted. Oh, my God! God help me! Quaking with fear, mumbling to himself through his sobs, he goes to the bed and gently takes Betty’s hand. Betty. Child. Dear child. Will you wake, will you open up your eyes! Betty, little one . . .
He is bending to kneel again when his niece, Abigail Williams, seventeen, enters—a strikingly beautiful girl, an orphan, with an endless capacity for dissembling. Now she is all worry and apprehension and propriety.
ABIGAIL: Uncle? He looks to her. Susanna Walcott’s here from Doctor Griggs.
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